Overview:



In this lecture on critical identities, Professor Fry examines the work of Stanley Fish and John Guillory. The lecture begins by examining Tony the Tow Truck as a site for the emergence of literary identities, then brings the course's use of the children's story under scrutiny through the lens of Fish. The evolution of Fish's theory of interpretive communities is traced chronologically through his publications and examined in close-up in Milton's Paradise Lost. John Guillory's work on interpretive communities and the culture wars leads to a discussion of the Western canon and multiculturalism.



Reading assignment:



Fish, Stanley. "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One." In The Critical Tradition, pp. 1023-30



Guillory, John. "Cultural Capital." In The Critical Tradition, pp. 1472-83

1. Introduction
2. Introduction (cont.)
3. Ways In and Out of the Hermeneutic Circle
4. Configurative Reading
5. The Idea of the Autonomous Artwork
6. The New Criticism and Other Western Formalisms
7. Russian Formalism
8. Semiotics and Structuralism
9. Linguistics and Literature
10. Deconstruction I
11. Deconstruction II
12. Freud and Fiction
13. Jacques Lacan in Theory
14. Influence
15. The Postmodern Psyche
16. The Social Permeability of Reader and Text
17. The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory
18. The Political Unconscious
19. The New Historicism
20. The Classical Feminist Tradition
21. African-American Criticism
22. Post-Colonial Criticism
23. Queer Theory and Gender Performativity
24. The Institutional Construction of Literary Study
25. The End of Theory?; Neo-Pragmatism
26. Reflections; Who Doesn't Hate Theory Now?

In this course, Prof. Paul H. Fry gives 26 video lectures on Theory of Literature. This is a survey of the main trends in twentieth-century literary theory. Lectures will provide background for the readings and explicate them where appropriate, while attempting to develop a coherent overall context that incorporates philosophical and social perspectives on the recurrent questions: what is literature, how is it produced, how can it be understood, and what is its purpose?